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Astronomers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have found an enormous and increasing bubble of fuel and dirt surrounding a purple supergiant star – the biggest construction of its form ever seen within the Milky Way. The bubble, which accommodates as a lot mass because the Sun, was blown out in a mysterious stellar eruption round 4000 years in the past. Why the star survived such a robust occasion is a puzzle, the scientists say.
The new outcomes are printed within the scientific journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the group was led by Mark Siebert, Chalmers, Sweden. Using the ALMA radio telescope in Chile, the researchers noticed the star DFK 52 – a purple supergiant much like the well-known star Betelgeuse.
“We got a big surprise when we saw what ALMA was showing us. The star is more or less a twin of Betelgeuse, but it’s surrounded by a vast, messy bubble of material,” says Mark Siebert at Chalmers.
The bubble, a fancy of clouds of fuel and dirt, weighs as a lot because the Sun, and extends out 1.4 gentle years from the star. That’s hundreds of instances wider than our personal photo voltaic system.
If the star was as near us as Betelgeuse is, the bubble would seem to span a 3rd of the complete Moon’s width within the sky.
ALMA’s radio observations let astronomers measure the movement of molecules within the cloud, revealing that the bubble is increasing. They consider it was fashioned when the star out of the blue ejected a part of its outer layers in a robust explosion just some thousand years in the past.
“The bubble is made of material that used to be part of the star. It must have been ejected in a dramatic event, an explosion, that happened about four thousand years ago. In cosmic terms, that’s just a moment ago,” says Elvire De Beck, astronomer at Chalmers.
The galaxy’s subsequent supernova?
Why DFK 52 shed a lot mass with out exploding as a supernova continues to be unclear. One risk is that the star has a hidden companion that helped it forged off its outer layers.
“To us, it’s a mystery as to how the star managed to expel so much material in such a short timeframe. Maybe, like Betelgeuse seems to, it has a companion star that’s still to be discovered,” says Mark Siebert.
Red supergiants like DFK 52 are nearing the ends of their lives and are anticipated to finally explode as supernovae. Could this star be subsequent?
“We’re planning more observations to understand what’s happening – and to find out whether this might be the Milky Way’s next supernova. If this is a typical red supergiant, it could explode sometime in the next million years,” says Elvire De Beck.
More concerning the analysis:
The analysis is introduced within the paper “Stephenson 2 DFK 52: Discovery of an exotic red supergiant in the massive stellar cluster RSGC2,” printed within the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The picture has been featured as ESO’s Picture of the Week.
The researchers concerned within the examine are Mark Siebert, Elvire De Beck and Wouter Vlemmings from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and Guillermo Quintana Lacaci from Instituto de Fisica Fundamental, Spain.
Red supergiants are a number of the rarest, brightest stars within the sky. They are the ultimate stage of evolution of stars born far more huge than the Sun (greater than eight instances the Sun’s mass). For astronomers, they’re keys to understanding the life tales of all stars and planets. The most huge stars create and unfold newly-formed components all through interstellar area, energising fuel and dirt, and serving to new generations of stars to type.
The closest purple supergiants in our galaxy, the Milky Way, are simply seen for anybody with a transparent view of a darkish night time sky. Betelgeuse, within the constellation Orion, and Antares, in Scorpius, are each well-known examples of purple supergiant stars.
More concerning the ALMA telescope:
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a world astronomy facility in Chile, is a partnership of ESO, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile.
In Sweden, Onsala Space Observatory at Chalmers University of Technology, has been concerned in ALMA since its inception; receivers for the telescope are one among many contributions. Onsala Space Observatory is host to the Nordic ALMA Regional Centre, which gives technical experience to the ALMA challenge and helps astronomers within the Nordic international locations in utilizing ALMA.
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